The Queer Portrait Project is a collaboration with the queer community, pairing each participant's narrative with my portrait of them. Queer people are often seen as faceless, autologous, nameless. One queer person becomes a representative and stand-in for a monolithic whole, robbing them of their own autonomous story. The Queer Portrait Project illuminates the breadth, depth, joys, struggles, and particularities of individual members of the queer community. The paintings and writings together allow the viewer to see and identify with the personal, distinctive, and particulate examples of each project contributor.

Thursday, April 4, 2024

BakiBakiBaki (they/them) and Papa Bear (he/him), Minneapolis to Mississippi to The Milkyway

To be Black, Native, and Queer is to embody the phrase, “loving throughout the cosmos”. To remember we are made from star dust and shall return. Queer love does not expire when we are slain. When we are murdered the love we gave grows to become as omnipresent as star shine be, as our stories are. From light years I’ve traveled to be born free and free our love shall be. I see myself as coupled still. The words “passing” and “transitioning” have spiritual depth not dependent on heteronormative understandings nor meanings. Crossing over and having a lover become an ancestor in their 20s is a part of being queer that can not solely exist in the realm of grief. We deserved celebration. Our love is abundant and joyful still…Not despite of distance and erasure nor because of it, like all and any love; our stories deserve context as our constellations combine, converse, and change.